Paradise
The washed-up shrimp
cooked pink in the hot Gulf
shallows, where we waded
despite the tide’s toxicity to
praise the glorious shoals
of the jubilee with oxygen,
flounder, and crab. Toes,
clam dives, kelp rope slung
around her abdomen and left
to dry. Tan or hide me as
the case may descry, but
with a cloud’s duration. The
jouissance of the living unreal.
Yet another thing that he
could, in the end, control.
The concept of syntax does
not, however, control for
the system it sets into being,
or for that system’s rampant
discovery. Should a successful
imperative declare itself.
A borrowed cadence. The rainbow
by which she knows she loves
is not reliable. The language
by which she loves, foregone
for broke.
***
Paradise
The archetypal story has
a porridge core. I’m studying
seismicity by starlight, a little
tremor in my sleight-of-hand.
Myth commits a systematic
falsehood we breathe with,
trying not to die. When the
water’s low-to-dangerous,
tune your voice up to hail
the blaze, or tune it down
to affirm the traditional
spectrum. You choose your
ledge, but how you learned
to say disastrous returns you to
the elements of chance.
Like current-bored bodies,
like high mountain misogyny,
like an artificial fire to spite
the burn ban vigilantes.
Let’s give up the ghost
of this minor misshapen
love before the predictable
avalanche makes mosaic of
the entire denouement
to the laugh track of the
jobless working class.
***
Paradise
Weather splits up its story,
splits the pier. Tides
throughout the Holocene
vivid and flush, viewed as
fragile but whole. How, from
that depth, at that frequency,
with such cast, such velocity,
and at that exact distance,
could I slide into foundations
meant to frame you and
the starfield in passing. I lay
my head by the blooming
chrysanthemum. Rainstorms,
an early pleasure. A lavender
dress in a lavender field,
marriage proximal and past
the towering hemlocks,
halfway over the actual hill.
***
Andy Stallings lives in Deerfield, MA, where he teaches English at Deerfield Academy. His second collection with Rescue Press, Paradise, will come out in spring 2018. He has four young children, and coaches cross country and track.
